The unofficial online home for fans of the Kent State University Golden Flashes. Part of Collegiate Sports Nation (CSN).

Good points anti zip.

The reason I caution fans (myself anyway) not to overreact to a loss or even a losing season is because it is contradictory. What I mean is that while I’ll can’t stand the “pay me now”, “if we lose it’s not my fault so I better blame someone or worse yet leave” culture that so many parents and players have created….i better not start bit(hin& and moaning when my favorite teams hit a rough patch.

God help us if we’ve reached a point where one bad season causes recommitments, transfers and the like. We are darn close.

(01-10-2024 09:01 PM)anti-zip Wrote:  

(01-10-2024 02:40 PM)burden Wrote:  

(01-10-2024 12:59 PM)Muskrat Wrote:  

(01-10-2024 09:47 AM)fallsdog Wrote:  or behind.

Always possible, of course, but after the past 25 years of Kent State basketball I choose to be optimistic.

I hope you’re right but in last few years I’ve seen men’s golf, gymnastics, baseball and wrestling get worse and the transfer portal hasn’t helped them yet. We’ll see.

Definitely understand your concern. So far the transfer portal has worked to our favor in basketball. IMO Sendy has navigated the portal extremely well. He's lost very few key players and pulled a ton of talent through it. My concern would be one bad frustrating year could cause several guys to leave and we'd be in a worse position to get good replacements coming off a down year. I'm not super worried about it yet. Hopefully the rotations settle down soon, we finds the right combination, and maybe get one or two guys healthy. A month from now if we're still playing like this and we're in the bottom half of the standings then I'm probably going to start getting nervous because I think there will be a lot of frustration among the players.

Take a step back and look.

While injuries have hit Kent State basketball HARD, the fact is, ALL those injuries are to underclassmen, and mostly players coming off the bench,

IT'S THE VETERAN GUYS WHO ARE PLAYING LIKE CRAP ... SHOWING NOW LEADERSHIP ... PLAYING NO DEFENSE.

When is the last time a Kent State team has had no veteran leadership ... certainly nothing like this. Kent has lost games before, and had losing streaks before ... but I can't remember this many double-digit losses in a season by a Kent team, and it's not halfway through the season yet.

THAT'S ON THE SENIORS/VETERANS ... Gio, Sully, Payton, VCDavis.

(01-11-2024 10:34 PM)cleveland Wrote:  

(01-10-2024 09:01 PM)anti-zip Wrote:  

(01-10-2024 02:40 PM)burden Wrote:  

(01-10-2024 12:59 PM)Muskrat Wrote:  

(01-10-2024 09:47 AM)fallsdog Wrote:  or behind.

Always possible, of course, but after the past 25 years of Kent State basketball I choose to be optimistic.

I hope you’re right but in last few years I’ve seen men’s golf, gymnastics, baseball and wrestling get worse and the transfer portal hasn’t helped them yet. We’ll see.

Definitely understand your concern. So far the transfer portal has worked to our favor in basketball. IMO Sendy has navigated the portal extremely well. He's lost very few key players and pulled a ton of talent through it. My concern would be one bad frustrating year could cause several guys to leave and we'd be in a worse position to get good replacements coming off a down year. I'm not super worried about it yet. Hopefully the rotations settle down soon, we finds the right combination, and maybe get one or two guys healthy. A month from now if we're still playing like this and we're in the bottom half of the standings then I'm probably going to start getting nervous because I think there will be a lot of frustration among the players.

Take a step back and look.

While injuries have hit Kent State basketball HARD, the fact is, ALL those injuries are to underclassmen, and mostly players coming off the bench,

IT'S THE VETERAN GUYS WHO ARE PLAYING LIKE CRAP ... SHOWING NOW LEADERSHIP ... PLAYING NO DEFENSE.

When is the last time a Kent State team has had no veteran leadership ... certainly nothing like this. Kent has lost games before, and had losing streaks before ... but I can't remember this many double-digit losses in a season by a Kent team, and it's not halfway through the season yet.

THAT'S ON THE SENIORS/VETERANS ... Gio, Sully, Payton, VCDavis.

I don't think you're totally wrong, but I also think the players deserve the same excuse that Sendy deserves. They were forced to change the way they play mid season and we're still going through the growing pains of that. That's why I saying if it still looks like this a month from now I'll be concerned. It's not who we lost but what we lost. We went from being a team that has a traditional back to the basket center on the court at almost all times to one that never does. Let's take Payton for example. There was probably a lot of effort in the off season that went into working on him spacing properly around the center so the middle isn't getting clogged up. Now our offense is much more perimeter based with him having more space inside. So there's a learning curve about where to be and when to be there. My personal belief is players don't get significantly better or worse during the season. Improvements come from players getting more comfortable in the system. Basically we're back to the early season phase of learning your role in the system but we're going against teams in mid season form.

As far as leadership. Personally I believe guys are playing very hard. There was a stretch in the second half with us down double digits where we were absolutely going balls out. I'm thinking of the play where just about everyone got on the floor and ended in Sully being called for a pretty weak loose ball foul. At one point I saw Payton getting after Sully and Moss after a defensive break down. I think the leadership could be there and the effort is there. Everything is just a bit disjointed right now, which is understandable. If it's like this in a month, then I think I'll agree with everything you said here.